Friday 6 February 2015

Planting at Corehead

Now that we are well into what has turned out to be a rather hardy winter, we're turning our efforts at Corehead into some planting in our Tweedhope plantation.

Following a survey in the summer we have decided to put in 5,000 trees in Tweedhope. These are to replace any trees that have struggled to grow or have died. We have gone for a mix of Sessile Oak, Downy Birch, Silver Birch, Alder, Goat Willow, Grey Willow and Rowan and most of these will be planted out within the next few months by a contractor.

We have also set aside 300 oaks for our new Corehead volunteer team to plant. We are focusing our efforts on one of the lower slopes in Tweedhope. This is a great spot for oaks as indicated by the large amount of bracken! As an indicator of good soil, it seems like a good place to start.


Some of the team were out yesterday marking out the trees to be replaced. We were looking for any that had died or had struggled to compete with surrounding vegetation.


We took the tubes off and replaced them at an angle. It only took us a few hours to find 300 and for our next volunteer day (weather permitting as always) we'll head out and plant!

Angled tubes a the top of the picture
But it doesn't end there. The bracken gets very dense in this area (remember when Carrifran meets Corehead) so we will be keeping a close eye on this area and doing some more targeted bracken management with our volunteers to help the new trees flourish. 

Lynn
Site Officer


4 comments:

  1. The main Carrifran website has not been updated in ages. Is there any chance of an 11th year picture from that same place looking out over the trees to show further progress? Also what is the map like now and what exactly is under ownership/management?

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    1. Hello - thanks for your comment and apologies for the delay in getting back to you. Our website is run by our volunteers so we do try to keep it as up to date as possible but occasionally things get a bit out of date. We try to make sure that we also share current things on our blog. The map is pretty much the same as the one on the Carrifran website - the planting over recent years has mostly been to enrich these existing areas.

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    2. As I understand it there has been more land purchased nearby like Talla & Gameshope that adjoin onto carrifran? Is it a case of each "site" is then treated as a different entity and the whole not managed as so?

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    3. Thank you for your comment. You are correct that we recently acquired a new site, Talla & Gameshope, which adjoins Carrifran. Although each site has its own character and they are at very different stages of development, ecologically they are being treated as one landscape scale project. In this way we can be sure of greater impact through our ecological restoration work.

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